11/28/2010

…It would not have occurred to people in the Middle Ages to call a landscape or even a plant "beautiful." A cornstalk was useful, a poppy a mere weed, and a lily nothing more than a symbol of the purity of the Virgin Mary. When Petrarch, the Tuscan poet, described the rapture he experienced during his famous ascent of Mount Ventoux in southern France in 1336, he did not devote a single word to the view he enjoyed at the summit; instead, the reader learns how nature whetted his appetitie to open a book he had brought along about St. Augustine, whereupon the mountain hiker began to contemplate all the foolish mistakes in his life and the insignificance of mankind as a whole.

…..The effect of the Mona Lisa can be summed up in two words: She lives. … ’She reacts to us, and we cannot but react to her. Leonardo is playing upon one of our most basic human instincts — our irresistible tendency to read the facial signs of character and expression in everyong we meet. We are all intuitive physiognomists at heart. No matter how many times our expectations of character on the basis of facial signs may be proved false, we cannot stop ourselves doing it.’

…..The expressions on these two pictures could hardly be more different. Moreover, Mona Lisa is looking to the left, and the old man to the right. But when Schwartz flipped the self-portrait and super-imposed the two images, they fit exactly.

& so a man named Stefan Klein came to say of another from another time and in a different order.

Well most of Borough of Jeffersonville still stuck with cover story now as more than two head off to Gullybuck’s for some baked goods. Seems a futuristic piece on weapons needing a future proliferating in keeping with fears of near earth objects (NEOs) has many in their time wondering how but not to work to new proliferations towards space defense for all.